Now I understand why globalisation is dangerous; if people start to favor short term relationships (both personal and business) with many different partners (smaller number of rounds <interactions> per match <lifetime>), then society will evolve to become full of cheaters.
Interestingly enough, seemingly to compensate for this phenomenon, almost every new platform that requires people to interact with each other has a built in trust and reward system with ratings (e.g. Uber).
And for physical businesses, we have things like Yelp. We are effectively trying to anticipate our opponents behavior through a trusted intermediary.
There was a Black Mirror episode on giving every person on the globe their own rating. It seems that may be the actual destination that we're headed for.
> There was a Black Mirror episode on giving every person on the globe their own rating. It seems that may be the actual destination that we're headed for.
"Nosedive".
One of the scariest things I've ever seen on screen. I joke about how realistic black mirror is but that episode was too much. Beyond uncanny. It was incredibly hard to watch and I hated every second of it. Awful. Cannot recommend it enough.
For one thing, people can build trust with the intend to abuse it after a longer period of time. An abuser, for example, could plan to offer 20 "good rides" on Uber until s/he strikes. For another thing, many people have learnt to skillfully simulate trust which may pose a problem for you. For instance, you may believe to be in a loving relationship but all of a sudden you find out that the other person isn't interested in you at all and just didn't want to be alone etc.
The book "Phishing for Phools" has a good chapter on "reputation mining", which is essentially that, with the added wrinkle that you can buy a company that has a good reputation and cut corners until the customers wise up. I'm looking at you, InBev.
A clear economic incentive to cheaters or a way to give a weight to mistakes? Does yelp use an algorithm to weight the thing or use the mechanism only as a source of income?
> Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
The economic incentive to encourage cheaters is the reason why the "trusted intermediary" should always be verified.
But someone wishing to get an advantage wouldn't just rely on that metric (IMDB, Yelp, Amazon ratings). There will be a mismatch between some personal metric and your own value system, and the difference is value you can reap.
There was a tremendous amount of social technology that had to be developed to allow people to regularly interact with strangers without trying to kill each other.
EDIT: Which is to say, a global community of 7 billion is absurd but not all that much more absurd than a city-state of 50 thousand.
There's an intriguing but hard to prove theory that some popular religions (Christianity, Buddhism) arose as cities became more populous, and in response to that. Part of your "social technology".
On that topic Harari's Homo Deus is a pretty interesting read. He argues that Humanism is the de facto "new" (2-3 centuries old) religion. Soon to be replace by the celebration of something even more global -- data.
Our Data, Who art in the Cloud, hallowed be Thy Index, Thy Algocracy come, Thy Classification be done, in IoT as it is in the Cloud, lead us not into Underfitting, but deliver us from Anecdotal Reasoning. For Thine is the algocracy and the market share and the celebrity: of the Network, and of the Server, and of the Holy Algorithm, DateTime.Now() and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Maybe, I have Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict on my reading list but that seems to be more a part of later developments than city states. Before that came written laws, and before that came having states. I guess I'd recommend reading The World Until Yesterday followed by The Origins of Political Order.
but we know that's not true. In the case of Christianity it arose in rural areas and was opposed by urban governments. Also, it did not spread in conjunction with urbanization but instead spread suddenly.
Interpersonal trust can be replaced with trust in legal frameworks, rules and contracts. Well functioning rule-based society is important for globalization.
Countries where personal relations are important for business suffer from smaller number of opportunities because forming personal trust takes time.
Sure, contracts and rules have their place, and are necessary in the absence of trust. But they do not substitute perfectly. A no-trust world of optimized rules and contracts will be lacking in important ways from a world with trust (to say it mildly).
Interestingly I had the opposite but complementary conclusion: if we end up forming many long term relationships through cooperation and maintain them we all are better off.
What I meant was that more interactions per relationship on a smaller number of relationships is better that fewer interactions per relationships across a larger number of relationships.
Basically with globalization, social media etc... The number of relationships have gone up but the quality and depth of each relationship has gone down. This makes it harder for the rational copycat personality type who relies on empirical evidence to build trust.
It's not clear that globalization will have this effect, though. For example, a study "In search of homo economicus: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies" found that individuals from cultures with more "market interaction" tended to make higher offers in an ultimatum game [http://authors.library.caltech.edu/11498/1/HENaer01.pdf].
(these studies are about market institutions, not explicitly globalization, but one could imagine that globalization could involve more market institutions; my point is just that globalization involves all sorts of factors, some of which are probably pro-cooperation and some of which are probably anti-cooperation, and it's not immediately clear whether the final outcome will be more cooperation or less)
Now I understand why globalisation is dangerous; if people start to favor short term relationships (both personal and business) with many different partners (smaller number of rounds <interactions> per match <lifetime>), then society will evolve to become full of cheaters.